Mobile World Congress - Featured Article

BroadSoft Expands Mobile Client-Related Efforts

BroadSoft, this week at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona, has a trio of announcements that includes a new partnership with Acme Packet, the commercial release of the BroadTouch Business Communicator, and an alliance with Enterproid.

The relationship with Acme Packet (News - Alert) involves the pairing and interoperability of the two companies’ technologies to create what’s called IMS Xpress. The combined solution leverages Acme Packet’s Net-Net SIP Multimedia-Xpress solution and BroadSoft’s (News - Alert) BroadWorks communications application solution. It provides carriers with lower cost and less complex IMS capabilities that are at the same time easily scalable.

As for the BroadTouch Business Communicator, that enables an integrated customer experience for voice, video, IM and presence across various endpoints and relies on a cloud-based environment. The company also offers the BroadTouch MobileLink mobile client, which is currently available for iOS and Android (News - Alert) devices.

Scott Hoffpauir, chief technology officer at BroadSoft, explains, “Businesses desiring comprehensive mobile unified communications applications will benefit greatly from Business Communicator, while MobileLink is ideal for enterprises seeking the flexibility to extend an employee's business number capabilities to mobile devices for BYOD IT environments.”

And Enterproid’s dual-persona Android mobile client (which allows users to set up separate applications and policies for their personal and businesses uses) is leveraging BroadSoft as an underlying technology.

Leslie Ferry, BroadSoft’s vice president of marketing, notes that BroadSoft now has three product areas. BroadTouch is a line of user experience clients. BroadWorks delivers core communications capabilities including call control, PBX (News - Alert) functionality, routing and more; and BroadCloud, BroadSoft's cloud-based, hosted infrastructure that serves as the foundation for the company's growing cloud-based communications capabilities.

BroadCloud includes high-definition videoconferencing, corporate instant messaging with phone presence, both on desktops and mobiles, and a suite of collaboration tools available on a wide range of devices. BroadCloud consumer services help telecommunications service providers expand their consumer offerings to include fixed-line SMS and web-based information services and tools.